A Little History Lesson and Reflection

In this industry, it seems very easy to get in the rut of looking forward without stopping to take the time and look back. Whether it is a project deadline or just planning for the future, past accomplishments sometimes get lost in the day to day workload. I remember back on January 23rd of 2006—exactly four years ago tomorrow—when we opened the doors. We had 17 employees and around 1,000 servers in our one and only Dallas server room. With just 17 employees you can imagine we wore many hats, and I will not miss or take for granted prepping racks such as putting cage nuts or rails in ever again.
From our humble beginnings, things grew at a rapid pace to say the least. Over the last four years, we have grown to 175 employees, 25,000+ servers spanning facilities in Dallas, Seattle, and Washington D.C. and just recently passed $100 million annualized run rate mark. Not too shabby for four years, if I do say so myself.
The product and service offering have grown at an astounding pace as well. Thanks in part, I think, to our API—launched publicly in May of 2007. Was that over two years ago? It seems like yesterday. On top of that, there have been too many individual products to list here. Some highlights would fall into the areas of: CloudLayer, StorageLayer, backup solutions, and security solutions—just to name a few!
Looking forward I think 2010 is going to be a big year for SoftLayer, not that the past years haven’t been. I cannot get into any details; but, as usual there are big plans on the horizon, and you know we aren’t planning on slowing down anytime soon. Looking back, it has been a packed and crazy four years, but I would not trade it for anything.